March 2008

The colder months of winter are finally passing, and along with the warming weather comes spring weddings, outdoor portrait sessions, formal high school dances, and many many soccer league games to photograph. It's the time of year when the ball gets rolling again, and business starts to boom! We hope that some of the changes that we have made in the past month will help you kick this season off with a great start, and that some of the announcements for the future that we will be making in this newsletter will keep you excited for the future seasons with us as well.

March News

First off, the credit voucher revamp that was announced in February's newsletter is now complete and in place! The new credit vouchers are no longer found in the “Store” tab, but are instead found in the “discounts” page within the “Setup” tab. We figured that since they no longer cost you anything to create or use, they probably shouldn't be in the store tab any longer. If you haven't had a chance to check out the new credit voucher system, go check it out now!

Another item that was reworked a bit this month is your product options. In the past a product was limited to having only a single image that represented that product, regardless of how many options accompanied the product. For example, you might have listed “Christmas Cards” as a product over the previous Holiday season, but with the limitation of having only a single image displayed with your product your clients couldn't see examples of each of your different Christmas Card options. Well, that limitation has now been removed, and from here on out you can add an image to each of your different product options! If you have seven different frames that you offer your clients, you can now show your client exactly what each of those frames looks like, and have them remain under a single product listing. There is no requirement to add the additional images, but for those of you that have been wanting to do it, the option is now available and ready for your use.

Another change on the product options is that you can now define a “quantity available” for each of them (as shown in the screenshot above). Let's say you only have XX of a particular product remaining, and you would like to offer the product through your storefront but don't want the hassle of watching your orders to manually remove the product option once there are no more remaining in stock... the new quantity limiting option can take care of this for you. Basically you just go into your product option, tell it that the option has limited quantities, and type in how many of that particular option is available. That's it. Your product option will now be displayed on your storefront as long as the quantity remains above zero; once the quantity is exhausted the product option will no longer be available to your clients. The system automatically reduces the quantity each time the product is ordered, so you don't have to worry about manually adjusting or watching that.

And the last change that was put in place in March was the ability to host one (and only one) event indefinitely. That's right, forever. No expiration date, no automatic image deletion, no limit. Some of you might be wondering what you would do with something like that, so we'll tell you! Do you have an event that all of your potential clients go to in order to look at your previous work? Do you have an event that you host your fine art prints in? Do you have any event that you have ever thought, “I sure do wish I could continue using this event without needing to reload it every 270 days!”? Well that is precisely what this new option is made for. You will find this option in the event definition screen (the screen where you give the event its name, city, etc.).

Sneak Peak

New Instaproofs Fees:

Now hold on, don't get all bent out of shape just yet! I know that when you see something that says the words “new” and “fees” in the same sentence it usually isn't good, but when have we ever given you bad news in the past? The new pricing model is actually something that will save you money. So now that we have gotten that out of the way, on to the new fee structure.

Starting April 5th the fees that you pay to Instaproofs will be based on your individual product/print prices. Your higher priced items will get charged a smaller fee, and your lower priced items will remain at 15%. The sliding scale breaks down as follows:

Product Sales Price

Service Fee

<$200

15%

$200 to $499.99

13%

$500 to $749.99

12%

$750 to $999.99

11%

$1000 to $1499.99

10%

$1500 to $1999.99

9%

>$2000

8%

See, that wasn't so bad now, was it?

New Service Agreement

Along with the new fee schedule show above, there is also a new service agreement document that you will need to agree to the first time you log in starting on April 5th. The agreement completely replaces the previous ecommerce agreement, and simplifies everything quite a bit. The old agreement was big, bulky, and hard to understand, while the new agreement is a bit more streamlined and very easy to understand. The major difference between this one and the previous one (besides the wording and layout) is that in the new agreement we outline what happens after an order is XX days overdue, and what happens when we are unable to contact you when/if we need to.

Conclusions

And that wraps up another newsletter! We have a few more items in the works for this coming month, but we'll just keep those under wraps until they happen...

Good luck to all of you throughout this spring season, and we'll see you here again next month!

Instaproofs, Inc. is a proud sponsor of the upcoming "Film is Not Dead Workshop" conducted by Jonathan Canlas. These workshops will be held from November 3rd through November 6th, and November 10th through November 13th on the North Shore of O'ahu in Laie. These workshops cover how to use our service, how Instaproofs changed his business, how to generate more print sales, and many other business and technical topics. For more information, click the banner above.

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Tip from a Pro:by Jonathan Canlas

USE THE FAVORITES: This comes in handy when fulfilling a pre-paid package. If your client bought a package that includes a certain amount of prints, they can add them to their favorites, which you can then access and pull from your hard drive. This allows you to fill packages without meeting in person. Click here to find out more!